For Kayla Elam, providing in-home child care is something of a family business. Her mother offered the service in their family home when she was growing up, and still has an in-home child care business in Shawnee to this day, which her younger sister also works at. Her twin sister offers in-home child care in Gardner, too. It was hard work, complicated by a number of factors. For one thing, parents didn’t always want to pay her or couldn’t pay on time, and it’s expensive to offer the service to begin with. There were also behavioral issues that parents didn’t want to hear about or didn’t believe Elam if she raised them. Beyond the challenges of the child care business itself, Elam also says it can be hard to balance some of the licensing requirements, specifically the classes and training hours a provider needs to log while already working long hours. Elam isn’t the only in-home child care provider who feels the challenges mounting. She said she knows several people who have stepped away. Data from Childcare Aware Kansas’ Johnson County Point-In-Time count shows that there are fewer licensed in-home providers than just a couple of years ago.
Read more: Johnson County Post
